A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE: If only the timing were different…
Fans love DC’s 100-pagers from the mid-’70s, with their bright backgrounds and chock-full-o’-images layouts. It’s something we talk about all the time in BRONZE AGE BONANZA.
But, the thing is, sometimes the main art on the page gets short shrift. The most cited example is Neal Adams’ primary image on Batman #255:
That’s a really cool cover, with the Nick Cardy vignettes down the right column.
But you just ache to see that Adams shot on its own, don’t you?
Click here for more about this ish because it’s just the set-up for the real reason we’re here — a look at Cardy’s own Batman #260, which we just highlighted in October’s BRONZA AGE BONANZA.
(Why are we doing this now? Because it’s the late Cardy’s birthday! He was born 104 years ago, on Oct. 20, 1920.)
It’s a terrific cover, right? But while I was researching the column, I happened upon three European comics that used that main image on its own.
The results, as they say, were glorious.
Dig these:
France
The Netherlands
Sweden
Oh, come ON! Those are beautiful!
You can’t go wrong with a bright, red background offsetting that yellow moon. It’s obvious why DC went in the direction it did, with a pale blue backdrop, given the orange-and-purple color scheme of the rest of the cover. But here, without the confines of the 100-Page format, we get to bask in what would certainly have been one of the all-time classic Batman covers.
Alas, we’ll always have Paris. And Amsterdam. And Stockholm.
—
MORE
— BATMAN #255: The End of NEAL ADAMS’ Classic BATMAN Era — 50 YEARS LATER. Click here.
— NICK CARDY’s BAT LASH: A Birthday Celebration in 13 COVERS. Click here.
October 20, 2024
They ought to do facsimiles of some of these 100 pagers (and esp the Adams cover) with the “full” cover image as the cover. I’d buy the heck out of them